The Corruption of Culture

Inside Higher Ed says there is a growing “gender gap” in tertiary education. The women are taking it over, or if you prefer, the men are leaving it. “Those predictions come from ‘Projections of Education Statistics to 2014,’ the latest version of an annual report from the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics that examines trends for the decade ahead.” Women will make up 58 percent of students by 2014. As far back as 2006, the New York Times was excoriating the emergence of “affirmative action for men”.

Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions … The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

Robert Weissberg argues that men have left the academe because it is hostile to them and all that they stand for. For another higher ed may be selling an increasingly more expensive yet less valuable product. The New York Times asked: “is the master’s degree the new bachelor’s?”

William Klein’s story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor’s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents’ Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school …

So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers’ new master’s program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he’d like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master’s. Browse professional job listings and it’s “bachelor’s required, master’s preferred.”

What Mr. Klein is investing in isn’t knowledge per se but a signal that he knows something. Signals are more important than reality. Such signals can be sent independent of whether or not they are true. Consider Shephard Fairey, whose work is displayed in the “Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London”. He somehow sent the signal that he’s valuable, even though recent events suggest that may not be true.

Shortly before he pleaded guilty to destroying documents in order to conceal that he plagiarized his famous “Hope” poster of Barack Obama from the Associated Press, he was beaten up outside a nightclub in Denmark over a cultural issue.

Fairey claims the two assailants called him “Obama illuminati” and ordered him to “go back to America”. He believes the attack was the result of a misunderstanding over his artwork commemorating the demolition of the legendary Ungdomshuset (youth house) at Jagtvej 69. His mural of a peace dove in flight surrounded by a circle of Tønder lace above the word “Peace” was vandalized within 24 hours of its unveiling with graffiti slogans “no peace” and “go home, Yankee hipster”.

Misunderstandings should be common among the brain-dead.

The Ungdomhuset was sacred to generations of Leftists, particularly the autonomen who saw dropping out — absenteeism, slow working, goofing off — as a revolutionary activity. Capitalism could be brought down by living outside of it, as espoused by the French Situationists who “advocated experiences of life alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism, for the fulfillment of human desires”.

One key idea was to turn “expressions of the capitalist system against itself” using pranks and culture jamming — holding anti-consumerist street parties and basically raising hell. That’s where people like Shephard Fairey should have come in. Fairey and his type are the new masters of “anti-art”, who reject conventional artistic standards, authorship, etc.

They are the guys who are good because they put a label on their t-shirts saying “good”. The triumph of labels of reality is the ultimate achievement of debased leftist culture. Stupid and destructive behavior are turned into “revolutionary acts” by characterizing it in French philosophical lingo none of which makes the slightest bit of sense.

Things are now what they say they are. We call grafitti street art. A life as a bum is now “reclaiming the street”. People who “reject” artistic standards and “reject” evidence — and even destroy it — become Shephard Fairey.

The real revolutionary players don’t believe a word of this claptrap of course, preferring to concentrate on seizing banks and manipulating politicians behind the scenes, but the European cafe Marxists have kept the mediocrities occupied (pardon the pun); even if the workings of their addled logic sometimes results in the autonomens punching Shephard Fairey.

But the most significant thing about this intellectual vaporware is that it has now become the staple of the academe. This drivel is now knowledge. People now get master’s degrees in goofing off. The Telegraph describes a day at the University of Bedfordshire, headed by Les Ebdon, now on track to supervise higher education in the UK.

A sunny afternoon amid Luton’s dreaming spires and a gaggle of second‑year psychology students is making its way past the pawnshop, the nail bar and the bookies, into the main campus of the grandly titled University of Bedfordshire.

The four, all aged 20, prefer not to be named. Once they begin airing their opinions, the reason for their reticence becomes clear, as they describe their experiences of an institution that offers a BA Hons in Football Studies, and where almost one in five students (18 per cent) fails to complete their course.

“All of us ended up at Bedfordshire because we couldn’t get into our first choices, and got places through clearing,” one girl says. “Would we rather be somewhere else? You bet.” …

Some institutions fear that Prof Ebdon might use as a blueprint his own University of Bedfordshire, where students can do a foundation degree in “beauty therapy and spa management”. On the university website, the BA Hons in Travel and Tourism is summarized in language better suited to a children’s book: “Travel is an exciting sector in which to work. You can often explore different countries and cultures as part of your job, plus you can inspire others to see the world, widen their perspectives on life and embrace the spirit of adventure.”

Bedfordshire, formerly known as Luton University until a judicious name-change in 2006, has 17,000 students and currently languishes in 101st place out of 113 in the most recent university league tables. Sport, education and nursing are key courses that attract many applicants. So does media studies, but no pure sciences are taught, no physics, no history and no foreign languages.

However, the university does boast in its prospectus that it was rated “second in the UK for marketing, equal second for journalism, third for complementary medicine, fourth for human resource management and seventh for dance” by the National Student Survey in 2009.

The question of whether and why a man should get a master’s degree to escape his job as a $7.25 per hour waiter has been stood on his head. The emphasis is now on getting an additional credential rather than acquiring additional knowledge by attending a master’s program, for which he will presumably pay a lot of money. Looking at the offerings at Dr. Ebdon’s school, it is unclear whether any knowledge is on offer at all. All he is selling is a devalued degree which is yours by “right”.

How is this different from a toy out of a box of cereal awarded to the taxpayer “by right”?

Arguably getting a PhD degree in autonomism or situationism would absolutely confirm that a graduate is qualified for nothing because anyone who decided to get into debt to learn what might have been composed by a French philosopher as a “prank” must be completely bereft of brains.

(I am even now working on a tome explaining that all of Marxism was conceived as a prank to deconstruct the world. To get people to give up their jobs, families and life in exchange for absolutely nothing. There is no Worker’s Paradise, there is no Democratic Centralism, there is no Hope and Change. All the Marxist leaders — Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, as well as others you might think of — lived in palaces attended by servants laughing at all the chumps.

It’s all a scam.

The working title is the Rise of the Absurdulons: a Critique of Politique. I’ll be famous soon and have invested in orange hair dye and am canvassing tattoo parlors.)

But that would be unfair. The rise of subjects like “beauty therapy” to the canon of knowledge suggests that their backers are very clever people; at least they are more cunning than the millions of parents who have gone along and purchased what they’re selling at the sacrifice of their life savings.

81 Comments, 81 Threads

There are lots of articles these days about the Higher Education Bubble. Because the majority of students are now female, the Noo Yauk Tymes will be able (accurately) to report “Women & minorities hardest hit”.

As an aside about U Luton/Bedfordshire not having physics classes — that apparently makes them the same as most universities in southern England. The problem, apparently, lies in high schools (secondary schools in UK-speak), where fewer & fewer English students get the prerequisites in maths, physics, science. But what need is there to study science? After all, every high school student knows that the important scientific questions like “Climate Change” have long since been “settled”.

The gutting of the arts has been going on since the ’60s, most prominently in the fine arts when people found they could advance faster by denying craftsmanship or a time of apprenticeship. So art and its various genres were circumvented and subverted and textualized until they became something else entirely, a true sense of “thinking outside the box” when it fact it amounted to little more than empty idiocy.

Straightforward photography and painting disappeared from museums and art centers and all was democraticized because the less one has to physically show the better case can be make for equality. In fact experience and judgement are very real things but can be assaulted in ways a guitarist or pianist on stage cannot be; you actually have to learn to do a thing in those cases.

I can’t tell you how many times people have looked at shots in my camera and said “The camera makes all the difference” in almost identical phrasing. In fact the camera does not make all the difference – I do. Everybody seems to believe that given equal access, they can all make films, music, photography, literature or pretty much anything. If one believes one is already there because you put your shoes on in the morning, why strive for excellence.

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies, intentionally consisting of nothing but drivel to see if they would publish it. They did.

The article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct.

He then announced it was a prank. But they had no sense of humor. If he had produced a crucifix covered in s**t, they might have laughed. But this was serious. He was immediately excoriated as being guilty of “tendentious misrepresentations”. Perhaps the best riposte was “the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true”. Now that is profound.

If the Situationists and Autonomenists had really written up their “critiques” as a prank, as nothing but a big joke, who would the joke be on? In other words if Marx and all those French philosophers were like Sokal but decided to take in the rubes to the cleaners rather than chivalrously announce the imposture who would detect it? The editors of these Marxist journals? The giant brains in Occupy? Try again.

And on what basis would they reject it, even if they suspected they were being subjected, as Barack Obama once put it, to the “okey-dokey”, since all truths are relative? “Nothing is true,” except presumably the statement that “nothing is true.”

Once you accept that it “all depends” there is no reason to prefer a Cambridge trained mathematician over one of Dr. Ebdon’s doctors in manicure sciences when calculating the trajectory of a spaceship to Mars. That would be elitist or racist or something. And unnecessary because even gravity is a linguistic construct, a proposition you could argue in an academic journal and have your name up in lights. Just take your own lies seriously and there’s no limit to how far you can get.

Now if history is any guide (assuming history isn’t just the narrative of evil white men) then this dream palace is bound to come crashing down with the swiftness of Perceval’s armies facing Yamashita once the first real challenge comes along to call the bluff. Quicker than the French Army could retreat in 1940. Because it’s a sham masquerading as the real. Defective at the very bottom, though it is blasphemy to say so. Just a house of cards waiting for the first wolf to huff and and puff.

I offer more confirmation of this. I happened to tune into an NPR show over the weekend and there was someone asserting that the important thing was to get a college degree in something, anything, because that showed that you had the drive and discipline to accomplish something. As Sec of Labor Robert Reich said in 1993, once out of Academia your employer will teach you something actually useful, anyway, so it really does not matter what you major in.

In the Marching Morons series of SF stories, the human race had separated into the super intelligent and the vast majority, those with unrealistic expectations of achieving mediocrity. While the super intelligent people fooled around with time travel and such at their secret base under Antarctica, the most capable of the masses got degrees in things such as Phd in Philosophy (Filing), and Doctor of Medicine (Applying Band Aids).

But while I have come to regard Kornbluth’s humorous stories as visionary, I see he was wrong in one very important regard. Knowing how to file things and apply Band-Aids actually are useful skills. Today’s Marching Morons would get Phds in The Impact of Band Aids on Global Warming and The Historical Use of Filing Cabinets to Subjugate the Masses.

One day not too far off the only Phd most people will be interested in is Post Hole Digger.

no. that’s npr bit is not new. my dad really believes this. He has had a long-running argument with his stepmother. Unfortunately- she has a certificate from a secretarial school. He has a post-doc in law. He’ll win any argument about college, except he can’t persuade his own children to follow in his path.

Wretchard wrote: I am even now working on a tome explaining that all of Marxism was conceived as a prank to deconstruct the world. To get people to give up their jobs, families and life in exchange for absolutely nothing.

The book has already been written. It’s called The Possessed (AKA The Devils), by F. M. Dostoevsky (1872). Well worth a (re-)read, as I’m sure Mr. Fernandez’s will be too. Also recommended: Joseph Frank’s biography of FMD (5 vols, the fourth of which, The Miraculous Years (1995) takes in the period of his writing this novel.

As of yet there has been no decline in the number men studying the sciences, engineering or math. I suspect that the men who are forgoing higher education are the one who would have be liberal arts and humanities majors. Far better to pursue a trade or drive a truck than pay $100k for a non-marketable LA or humanities degree. While there are more women in the sciences most women have been ghettoized into education and other worthless subjects. The only males outside the sciences are the beta males who nobody wants.

What I find amazing is that this is coming from the same people who insist that they are far more intelligent than the lunkhead conservatives they disagree with. It is telling that people who place such a high value on proving that they are so much smarter are now making an effort to remove anything that might actually distinguish differences in intelligence.

I have long since believed that many of the “smart set,” those smarter-than-thou types weren’t all that smart to begin with. They only got their degrees (in the humanities and social sciences) by parroting what they figured their professors wanted to hear. They lack true intelligence, scholarship, creativity or accomplishments.

But apparently, even basic parroting is too hard for today’s youth. They can skip that and just get a degree in manicures and pedicures before they publish yet another ‘study’ that purports to show how dumb as box of rocks conservatives are.

One of the key characters in the Possessed is a Stavrogin who is determined to demonstrate his complete power, and thereby his rejection of any external influence — to put himself ‘beyond the reach of God’ — by committing one infamy after the other. Eventually he molests a little girl and induces her to commit suicide.

The most crushing blow to Stavrogin comes when the monk Tikhon persuades him that he must pay for his crimes, indeed suffer for them. But in end the God will forgive him. Stavrogin hates the idea. “You are laying a trap for me … you want me to marry … to end my life as a member of the local club … Why that’s penance, isn’t it so?” That were too great a humility for Stavrogin to assume. The idea of being ordinary was the one thing he couldn’t swallow. (For those of you who’ve read my novel, remember that theme?)

Stavrogin was haunted by possibility that the question Tikhon asked him, “what if a stranger would be prepared to forgive you … sincerely?” could be answered in the affirmative.

I think the Death of God project is itself dying. By that I do not mean that the Christian God or some other idea will stride forth triumphant, only that the experiment of man living only under his own authority, without reference to external reality is over. “It Depends” has brought us Hitler, Stalin and Mao. We cannot survive it for much longer.

We are intellectually disarmed, reduced to madness almost, by this notion that we can make anything out of anything by the operation of human will. We cannot. The great sacrament of the Left is abortion for the same reason that Stavrogin’s was pedophilia. It’s a declaration of independence from God, or god, or nature, from all possibility of any restraint but our own whim.

The key insight is to realize that there is really no reason you can give, in the PC universe, as to why you should not abuse your daughter. No reason at all. It’s all arbitrary. And one day when they have finished sanctifying all the different kinds of marriages they want to sanctify, they will get to pedophilia.

Stavrogin’s horror at Tikhon’s declaration that even he was not beyond the power of God’s forgiveness reminds me of the incident in Lord of the Rings (the book) when Saruman stabs Frodo treacherously but the dagger turns on the mithril coat. He expects to be killed, but Frodo waves him on to seek what salvation he still can, for Saruman’s cure “is beyond us”.

Saruman trembles in rage. “You have truly grown great! And I despise you for it!”

I think we may find that there are no doors to Hell. They devils stay in there because they do not want to come out. What keeps them in is their pride in being wrong; the idea that they are better, even if they are wrong.

That is what will keep the Left to its course too. They know they’re wrong. But they will never admit it. Of all the things they love, nothing do they worship more than their own feet.

I recall reading years ago about an aspect of Chinese culture, supposedly much more enlightened and less sexist than ours. They reportedly had many more female than male physicians. Someone put paid to that argument; the fact only showed that physician was a low status occupation among the Chinese. Maybe something analogous is dawning on men confronting choices about college; if so, it’s all to the good.

when Saruman stabs Frodo treacherously but the dagger turns on the mithril coat. He expects to be killed, but Frodo waves him on to seek what salvation he still can, for Saruman’s cure “is beyond us”.

I just happened to catch a rerun of Clint Eastwood’s “Heartbreak Ridge”, where he’s a grungy old gunnery sergeant training a new Marine recon squad. There’s a key scene where the squad rejects his authority and sends the monster Swede to tear his head off. Eastwood knocks him down and then out, the squad scampers. Swede volunteers, “I’ll wait outside for the MPs”, and Eastwood says, “Negative. We’re going to make a marine out of you, starting now.”

Hostility to boys and masculine behavior begins in pre-school and continues apace through the entire educational system. Males are a dwindling percentage of college graduates not because the college educational environment is hostile, but because hostility at the primary and secondary levels has left boys without the intellectual tools necessary to succeed in college (or even gain admission to college) or, for those with the necessary skills, with little interest in pursuing post-secondary education. Boys now learn early on that school is for girls and behave accordingly.

Males are adaptive creatures – far more so, I would argue, than females. Boys and men are in the process of adapting to a cultural milieu that has made traditional paths and behaviors untenable. I believe there are three looming implications for white males of this new cultural dynamic: 1.) a general disengagement from traditional social, cultural, and economic activities; 2.) a dramatic decrease in economic productivity; and 3.) new sorts of cultural enmities, including virulent misogyny. Among white women, spinsterhood and illegitimate parenthood will become the norm. We’ve already seen exactly these sorts of changes in the Black community. Now it will spread to the white community, as well.

“We are intellectually disarmed, reduced to madness almost, by this notion that we can make anything out of anything by the operation of human will. We cannot.”

I have come to think that one reason for so much of transfer of jobs and production work to overseas locations is the rise of Management as a profession in its own right. Used to be, you learned how to do something and in so doing learned how to manage it. Now, I have an MS in Systems Management and I came to realize that Management was worth studying. But studying Management with the end objective of becoming a Professional Manager – one that can manage anything just by applying the proper principles – is a fool’s errand.

How nice it must be for the Professional Manager in a corporation to realize he can outsource all of that messy production business to someone else and just become a middleman. He truly is creating things with his mind, and only that.

“Pay no attention to the thousands of people behind the bamboo curtain. I, the Great Oz the Manager, will create it all.”

The cross in the urine was mentioned. There are two ways to interpret this “artistic” statement. One, that the artist was portraying his personal perception that this is how christianity is treated nowadays. In graphic fashion he follows the way christianity is being treated to it’s end. Or, two, he is encouraging further sacrilege and debasement of the faith, and it’s holy symbols, perhaps or in fact, preaching it as some kind of perverse ritualistic behavior (more) suitable for us to engage in. Monkey see, monkey do. If it’s ok for him to do it, it must be right and/or sanctioned for me to do it too. Most would feel the second objective is what the artist, and academe is striving for. Proselytizing for. Either way it’s chilling. The point is that there are things one just should not do, for what it encourages, the chain reaction effect and all it’s ramification when embracing, either casually or deliberately, as Savrogin explicitly states, the service of evil to oppose anything and everything that is good. Evil is the medium (the clay or paints) of man, an effort to create something beyond the creation of the almighty, from whom all things good originate.

“The idea of being ordinary was the one thing he couldn’t swallow. (For those of you who’ve read my novel, remember that theme?)”

Wretchard, this fear of being viewed by others as ordinary or even less encrusts essentially all of the left who are not in absolute leadership roles, and even some of them. It explains much of the behavior one sees coming from the public employee class, and the academic arena. It gives insight into the desire for shibboleths, indeed for anything that can signify elevated status relative to the “other”.

This is one of the appeals of the left to the not-quite-intellectual who wants very much to be accorded the status of being thought of as extremely bright. The left gives “permission” to anyone who parrots the words and apes the behaviors – whether they understand them or not – to go about life feeling as though they are among the smartest, the most compassionate, and the most enlightened. Watch certain TV shows, listen to certain radio programs, read certain newspapers, and you’re one of the truly bright and wonderful. Understanding is optional. This describes the readers of the NYT or Boston Globe and the almost all of the users of public broadcasting with perfection.

Crichton described this succinctly. Someone who reads the NYT science section once a week and presumes that they are an expert in science even though they majored in arts or social science and have never actually taken a real science or engineering course or have any job experience in those fields, or words to that effect.

Promotion of this “permission” by leadership amongst the left is one of the great appeals to the perpetual adolescent – the insecure semi-smart pseudointellectual know-it-all type – and so is a recruiting tactical advantages, since the center and right simply do not engage in this sort of pandering and do not offer individuals with that mindset very much in the way of status elevation.

“(I am even now working on a tome explaining that all of Marxism was conceived as a prank to deconstruct the world. To get people to give up their jobs, families and life in exchange for absolutely nothing. There is no Worker’s Paradise, there is no Democratic Centralism, there is no Hope and Change. All the Marxist leaders — Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, as well as others you might think of — lived in palaces attended by servants laughing at all the chumps. It’s all a scam.”

You are absolutely right. Marxism is the political-economic equivalent of perpetual motion machines. The latter keep showing up even though anyone with more than a passing knowledge of physics (a real field of study, as opposed to situationalism) could explain why they have, do not and will never work. But the hucksters keep “inventing” new ones and getting the rubes to “invest” in them. Marxism is the same crap in a different bowl. Stalin, Mao, Chavez, Castro and Obama are the hucksters. While they walk away with the wealth, the “investors” will reap the dividends of the gullible.

The most powerful idea in the Declaration of Independence, it seems to me, is the denial of absolute and ultimate human authority over things. The word Creator can at one level simply be read to mean, “from a place beyond human authority”. Human dignity is declared from “out of human scope”, like a global variable somewhere. Hence, no person or government can extinguish it. We cannot apply a destructor to it. Facts similarly proceed from “out of human scope”. They are just there. We cannot alter them. They are unalterable.

This is not only the wellspring of freedom but the foundation of the scientific method. The idea that world exists outside of the human mind (which is what the Party in 1984 denied) is the key to real power as opposed to imaginary power; just as the acceptance of human dignity from out of governmental scope is the key to real freedom. There is something real, actual and puissant out there to discover. Facts, the freedom to examine those facts. It isn’t all “a matter of opinion”.

Without that notion, we are a theocracy under the thumb of whatever group of men have appointed themselves as today’s gods. But if meaning exists; if the stars truly shine, if perhaps transcendence is worth looking for then we live. And we can never completely be oppressed. That is why to gain absolute power the Left first had to war on God.

Not any God in particular; the Christian, the Jewish or the Muslim — anything outside the authority of man was a threat. Even the facts. There could not be anything that escaped their competence, outside the ‘consensus’. They were all. And if we accepted this, they would free us of sexual morality; free us of freedom; give us a handful of gruel and council housing. And the world would be as one.

The trouble with that is that there are always other god-men. Men as mean and ambitious as them. Other tyrants, in other words. And so we had the history of the 20th century. The madness has not yet left us. But we are close. I think that for the first time in more than a century people are starting to think: “how could I have believed that s**t?” How indeed?

The gutting of the arts has been going on since the ’60s, most prominently in the fine arts when people found they could advance faster by denying craftsmanship or a time of apprenticeship. So art and its various genres were circumvented and subverted and textualized until they became something else entirely, a true sense of “thinking outside the box” when it fact it amounted to little more than empty idiocy.

You’re off by more than 100 years. The arts started going to hell when the elites rejected the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th Century, because it enabled the emerging middle and lower-middle class to live lives closer to those lived by the elite.

Once machinery became capable of producing goods that were reasonable facsimiles of those ornate handcrafted items owned by the truly wealthy, the truly wealthy first fled towards the revived medievalism of pre-Raphaelitism, then—when that proved too expensive—embraced the hand-hewn simplicity of “craftsman” furnishings and “form follows function.” Along the way art and artisanship, formerly one, became divorced—and art which displayed artisanship could always be damned as “mere illustration.”

It is a bitter irony that artists from Braque and Picasso through Warhol and beyond have relied upon the commercial vigor of “mere illustration” to make their daubings worthy of notice, but that’s another discussion.

On a beautiful spring day back in 1970 I was walking down a street in Amsterdam and I ran into Jeff, a friend who grew up in New York but moved to my hometown in Ohio to go to college. Jeff was living with a bunch of squatters and he invited me over to see their squat. The squatter movement was both a political statement and a way to save on rent. If I remember correctly the “row houses” in the area were condemned to make way for mass transit.

A kind of hipster homemaker presided over the kitchen. She was also from the US. She seemed like a nice girl and we had some tea and after a few minutes of stimulating conversation she suggested that we take a shower together (this is how I know the conversation was stimulating). Her and I. Together in the shower. I thought she was joking but Jeff indicated she was serious. I guess it was a way to save water or something. So I said, “You have known me for a few minutes and you want to take a shower with me? Ain’t that abnormally friendly? Has a tape worm ate part of your brain or something?”

Actually, I did not say that. Instead I said “Ah, no thank you…I just showered. Yesterday, I think it was. Yes, I remember now. It was Yesterday.” Now, if I’d actually known her for a whole quarter of an hour I might have given a different answer. As it was my Midwestern working class parochial school persona held together nicely.

Jeff planned to move into a room on the ground floor where the sewage leaked in. The room provided empirical evidence that sh!t really does run down hill. Once reaching the bottom it stays there though I suppose there is some formula involving specific gravity that would predict the flow.

Well, Jeff got the sewer fixed and cleaned out the room. He wore boots that came up over the knees (from the looks of them when he finished they could have been taller). Jeff showed a lot of resourcefulness and enterprising spirit cleaning out that room — the kind that would have made him the head of Goldman Sachs one day (if he had only gone to Harvard).

Jeff introduced me to a lot of Dutch Leftists and they all seemed very nice and displayed that famous Dutch tolerance by tolerating the American Leftists. One thing I noticed, though: They never quite knew when to laugh. Maybe that is what got that Fairey fellow clobbered.

“The most powerful idea in the Declaration of Independence, it seems to me, is the denial of absolute and ultimate human authority over things….”

The Bible explored this theme, profoundly, in the story of the Tower of Babel. In non-canonical tradition, Nimrod is the king who ordered and supervised the building of the tower. The peoples of the world, united in language, sang his praises: “Who can bend the bow of Nimrod, or put strength into the arrow like unto his strength? Nothing is too mighty for him to do. No power is greater than his. He hath taken the earth and made it his own. He stores up the thunder and wears the lightning like a jewel. The glory of Nimrod shines beyond the sun. There is none greater than he,
in earth or heaven.”

But they were wrong. There was One who was greater. “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

“Without that notion, we are a theocracy under the thumb of whatever group of men have appointed themselves as today’s gods. But if meaning exists; if the stars truly shine, if perhaps transcendence is worth looking for then we live. And we can never completely be oppressed. That is why to gain absolute power the Left first had to war on God.

Not any God in particular; the Christian, the Jewish or the Muslim — anything outside the authority of man was a threat. Even the facts. There could not be anything that escaped their competence, outside the ‘consensus’. They were all. And if we accepted this, they would free us of sexual morality; free us of freedom; give us a handful of gruel and council housing. And the world would be as one.”

Every time I hear an atheist say that belief in God isn’t necessary to have general morality or an enlightened society that respects freedoms, I always ask them for an example of a society run by atheists that was anything but a brutal, raping, torturing, murdering autocracy. Of course they cannot give me one. And I suspect that such an animal literally cannot exist. It may be true that some small number of individual atheists are capable of this on a personal level. In groups, never.

It isn’t just nations that become evil hells when the atheists (particularly the ones bent on destroying religion) take over. Witness the takeover of the academy by athiest, statist, secular extremists and the rise of political correctness and speech codes. A professoriate that was composed of believers simply did not do this, whatever their faults may have been.

The fact is that those individuals who are unrestrained by the understanding that our rights and freedoms come from beyond the authority of men and their governments are also organically incapable of organizing and running humane, enlightened, free societies. It is true that religious leaders can be despots, but they can also be good leaders. Atheists, never. That there has never been a good and decent society run by those who don’t acknowledge the Creator, even after dozens of attempts and hundreds of millions dead and suffering. This ought to be clue enough. There isn’t some “new way”, there isn’t some permutation that hasn’t been tried yet that will work. All meaningfully different versions have been tried, and found wanting. It’s time to stop.

They never quite knew when to laugh. Maybe that is what got that Fairey fellow clobbered.

Back in the underground we used to say you could always spot the Man from the Party because he was Grim and Determined, which we abbreviated as “G&D”. “Look out for X. He’s one of them; completely G&D.”

Why that was, I don’t know. But a friend of mine who recently passed away used to say that “it’s because they take themselves too seriously. No irreverence.” That happens when you think you’re god on earth and have all the answers.

When I came to Australia I found the perfect word for them: “wowser”, used in the past to describe not a Christian or a moral person, but someone who made self-righteousness a life-long profession.

The Australian writer C.J. Dennis defined it thus: ‘Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder’.

You really have to dine out with the hard left to discover what a “wowser” is really like. All kinds of subjects of conversation are off limits, and in fact, unless you belong or pretend to belong, you are best off keeping completely silent. Rather than being the paragon of tolerance, they are in fact the epitomes of bigotry. Completely combative on anything which even remotely transgresses the Party Line.

Clearly, you have been attending the summer backyard parties at my brother’s house in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. You can guess–correctly, I think–what sort of people you’ll find there. Yikes. I am generally silent, except perhaps to ask someone to pass the mustard. Can’t get a word in edgewise; wouldn’t want to. You can’t tell those people anything. But they’ll certainly tell you. So I sit there quietly with my wife and dog, puffing a cigar, until it’s time to go.

The great attraction of the currently popular secular religion of the left is that it separates the concept of morality from the actions of the individual who practices it. It is a magical religion where goodness consists of reciting the proper spells and incantations such as “save the planet,” “down with capitalism,” “Down with BushChimpyHitler,” or whatever. So long as as the right incantations are spoken the followers are absolved of all sins, whether it be living lavish lifestyles that the infidels would be vilified for living or leaving huge carbon footprints while traveling to exotic vacations.

For the Enlightened Ones of today the symbols and the spells accompanying them are more real than the actual things they are supposed to represent. In most of the religious religions men are held to an objective standard of righteousness–your deeds do indeed count. Mouthing the gospel while defaming it with your actions was to be despised both here and above.

But that is the central attraction of Leftist dogma. The symbols and talismans woven out of words are all that matters. They trump reality each and every time, and so long as you pay proper obeisance to the symbols you are beyond sin forever. Its a notion that is very attractive to the baser impulses of the human mind: having an infinite number of “get out of Hell free” cards.

But like all systems of viewing the world it spills over and colors everything. A degree, rather than representing what it was traditionally supposed to mean, merely becomes a symbol that can be mass-produced and handed out to the true believers like free candy or tampons. For the symbol is all. Reality is merely an ugly superstition that only an infidel could believe in.

Watching Fox News is enough to make me sick. Shep Smith is pontificating about Santorum’s comment that Obama is a “snob” regarding the need for a college degree. Funny, a lack of a college degree does not seem to have stopped Shep Smith, or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs!!

And he is bloviating about the effects of the BP spill when most of the “economic losses suffered” by those who own real estate was due to the hysteria provoked by Shep Smith, the KGB dupe, in the first place. Boy is he going to HATE it when those beachfront property owners don’t get to hit the justice jackpot!

… but that was not the piece, maybe it was taken down for some reason.

–

The problem is exemplified by our POTUS, a community organizer who never did a thing in his life, it seems, but mau-mau until the white man did what he demanded. All he needed were the magic words, and if the magic was never entirely fulfilled, he could blame the deficit (sic) on da man.

The DOING of things, is so frowned upon now. We like them done, … by someone else. Out of sight. In China. Maybe we caught this from the Saudis? We all want to be elite, or is it effete.

If there’s a corruption of culture, that’s it, cuz the American tradition has pretty much always been in the doing, compared to any other culture on the planet. I know I’ve ranted about this in the context of my IT work and STEM jobs, and it’s also part of my favorite tropes on this being an age of proud ignorance. Nothing entirely new there, it’s in “Atlas Shrugged” where the passengers DEMAND to be delivered to their destinations yada yada, and all those responsible and competent are forced to run away, leaving the last, drunken fool in the yard to attempt it and bring about the entailed disaster.

I happened to tune into an NPR show over the weekend and there was someone asserting that the important thing was to get a college degree in something, anything, because that showed that you had the drive and discipline to accomplish something.

This thread– including the Telegraph‘s observation about the rebranding of Luton as Bedfordshire University reminded me of Paul Fussell’s book Class, published in 1983. In the chapter titled “The Life of the Mind,” Fussell (who taught at Penn, FWIW) took aim at Vance Packard’s oft-cited notion (which NPR is obviously recycling) that any college degree was worth having by pointing out that there was (at least in the 1980s) a considerable difference between a diploma from a selective college and one from a nonselective institution. Fussell noted that a degree from one of the 1800+ American schools in the latter category conferred no economic advantage at all on its holder; moreover, “usually awareness of the great college-and-status hoodwink goes unexpressed . . . Entering some backwater college convinced . . . that ‘you have to go to college to be respected,’ the candidate emerges four years later to find he’s not respected at all because his college has no clout.” Fussell blamed the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for what he called “the college swindle,” and had some wicked fun mocking the progression of state teachers’ colleges to state colleges and then state universities in the 1970s. His summary statement about the higher education bubble that was in its early stages as he wrote sounds prescient almost 30 years later: “The number of hopes blasted and hearts broken for class reasons is probably greater in the world of colleges and universities than anywhere else.”

For those interested: Class is out of print but secondhand paperback copies can be had from AbeBooks and the usual suspects.

It’s a crime and a shame to require a masters for banal jobs, and that’s the trend unfortunately. However the complexities in fields like chemistry and biology mean that people must invest more years to attain the cutting edge of research.

Think about this- perhaps you’re bright and know all the functions on a scientific calculator. But could you build that calculator from scratch? Doubtful.

This is not a mere “science over humanities” argument. I don’t even know what I mean really.

As the revolutionary democrats begin to rise in Russia, different ideologies begin to collide. Dostoyevsky casts a critical eye on both the left-wing idealists, portraying their ideas and ideological foundation as demonic,[1] and the conservative establishment’s ineptitude in dealing with those ideas and their social consequences.

Wow, that sounds kind of familiar.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m a product of publik skool edumacation, so I’m a bit ignorant of classic literature such as this. BC has been a true education for me. Thanks for all of the learnin’, one day I hope to at least approach the level of people like wretchard and the other quality commenters here.

22 @Buzzsawmonkey

Ah yes, this attitude is still alive today in places like Portland, whos hipsters value the “authentic” and “artisanal” more than anything in the ‘Verse.

A college degree, even from a nonselective institution, might be the best thing for you, but in other cases it might not. A lot depends on a person knowing what he wants; and some too depends on his parents, teachers and friends, showing him what is possible.

The worst reason to go to college is because “you have to”. The best reason is that it offers what you need; or fills holes that you find need filling. Sometimes it fulfills the role of a tour d’horizon, which is valid, up to a point. Kids sometimes don’t know what they want and need to see what’s out there to find their calling.

A good university does that. Stimulates curiosity, makes a student want to be like something or learn something. Envy, insofar as it leads one to seek the better, is to a certain extent good. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be like a winner.

But to go into one of Dr. Ebdon’s establishments, already feeling like a loser, for that is how he treats you, by offering these courses on nail polish, is just a waste of time, unless you really wanted to be a manicurist in the first place, there being nothing wrong with that. However, going into Ebdonia when you had your heart set on a physics degree at Cambridge, now that’s a soul deadening experience.

A man is better off starting a business, or learning to program or get math over the Internet from the Khan academy than he is attending a consolation prize university. In general the attitude should be. Never go to a university simply because it’s expected.

Dear No. 4, although we have never done it, a group of us artists have long dreamed of applying for a state or foundation fine arts grant in photography by having photos taken with a point and shoot by a monkey and 6 yr. old child and then writing an accompanying artist’s statement with the usual overtextualized drivel. The link below tells us it’s an easy score:

Loughner took umbrage at her answer, and eventually shot her for it. (The logical answer would have been “Then what does your question mean?” although that might have made him angrier.)

In any case, these are valid philosophical questions addressed in fine works like Siddhartha. By themselves, I don’t think enigmas drive people crazy, rather crazy people are tragically fixated on them.

It is one thing to pursue a liberal arts degree with no clear plan, it is another to pursue one with the idea of making it your career. Then you find out you have to drink the Kool-Aid to advance. Or perhaps you’re a straight, white, Christian male. You find that not only are the lunatics running the asylum, but it’s a very selective group of lunatics. One diversity is possible.

The whole edifice of academia is so absurd, so decadent and self-indulgent, swirling around on an inflatable horsie in a sea of champagne bought on monies seized from the proles. What frauds.

Romans 3
9 What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. 10 As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
11 there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”[b]
13 “Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”[c]
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”[d]
14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”[e]
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 ruin and misery mark their ways,
17 and the way of peace they do not know.
18 “There is no fear of God in their their eyes.”[g]

19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.
Righteousness Through Faith
21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness is given through faith in[h] Jesus Christ to all who believe.

Much the same thing happened 80 years ago. Men were discouraged from pursuing education, and the numbers of women in colleges and medical schools rose dramatically. Following the crash of 1929, again as now due to too much debt, worldwide misery ensued, and the young men of that generation were sent to war. When they returned they were given the G.I bill and a new respect, and for a generation men made up the majority of the leadership positions. History follows a cycle like this, the book The Fourth Turning lays out how it happens as the characteristics of each generation lend every 20-year segment its canonical flavor. The crash of 2009 followed 80 years after 1929 and if the schedule plays out similarly this time, a huge war involving much of the world will begin about 2019-2021. It is interesting to watch events in the news and try to guess which are the straws in the wind that point how the coming war will unfold.

Those who have been pushing the idea of a degree just for the sake of a degree don’t even understand how they are gradually cutting their own throats by pushing this. If a degree is a degree is a degree, then an online degree is just as good as one where you have to sit in some boring classroom. And an online classroom, just like an online bookstore, is always going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than a brick and mortar institution, while having *better* choice quality than many of the physical locations can offer.

In short, these wannabe “universities” like Ebdon’s, will soon go the way of B. Daltons, and Waldenbooks, and Borders – all casualties of the efficiencies an online presence can bring to things. Now, am I making the case that an online education is really going to be effective? No, it can be, but it can also be as big a fraud as anything. BUT – if a student is going to be ripped off, he might as well get ripped off at 1/10 the price.

I went to City College for two years wherein I took general ed and an undeclared minor in Beauty Therapy. I called it Girl Watching and it generated a pleasant endocrine buzz. Of course all that changed when I went to the Seminary and worked on a degree in Beauty ever Ancient, ever New.

The state abhors competition, especially at the low end. The NYC subways have advertisements plastered by the City University featuring sad people describing how they were swindled by some private vocational school but are doing much better going to CUNY. If the markets were allowed to function then the surplus graduates of second tier doctoral programs would not be finding jobs in community colleges and the bloated state university satellite networks. They should be teaching Junior High. A free market should also result in more young men opting to go to college, and even to major in liberal arts, because that is where the babes are.

if a student is going to be ripped off, he might as well get ripped off at 1/10 the price.
Bingo.

The future might really lie in the industries that hire graduates of any category of majors to collaborate on creating a standardized test for college graduates of those majors to see what, if anything, they might have learned and what their abilities are. If it was a widely dispersed effort in creating the tests those relying upon it to hire would be more than likely to escape potential dreaded “disparate outcome” lawsuits if they relied upon it.

And as far as economy is concerned, if you want to make everyone a college graduate the only way to do that is to lower the standards for graduation down to the point where someone who was born into an eternal coma can earn one. If that is the case why don’t we just give a college degree of the recipient’s choice to them for free at the age of twelve? We could eliminate the college middlemen and save a lot of money by doing so.

And as far as credentials go, we could all be equal. I get the Progressive Fuzzy Leg Tingles just thinking about it. Equality, that is.

As of yet there has been no decline in the number men studying the sciences, engineering or math. I suspect that the men who are forgoing higher education are the one who would have be liberal arts and humanities majors. Far better to pursue a trade or drive a truck than pay $100k for a non-marketable LA or humanities degree. While there are more women in the sciences most women have been ghettoized into education and other worthless subjects. The only males outside the sciences are the beta males who nobody wants.

Girls always went to Finishing School in larger numbers than men. And that’s what the various Studies degrees have become. Not very good finishing schools, mind you, but that’s what they are none-the-less.

This exchange unnerved me at the time and still does today. Deranged and corrupted as Laughner was, he actually asked a key question of our time, and Giffords could not answer it.

How many key words of the Constitution have been judicially redefined? “Limited times” for copyright are not actually “limited” in the ordinary sense. To “regulate interstate commerce” means that the government can budget your money for you and tell you what to buy with it. “Natural born citizen” used to have a meaning, but a collective amnesia has swept the nation. How many millions of words, penumbras, rainbows and emanations does it take to redefine a remarkably clear, precise Constitution into a shapeless mass that means everything and therefore nothing?

46. wws – Those who have been pushing the idea of a degree just for the sake of a degree don’t even understand how they are gradually cutting their own throats by pushing this. If a degree is a degree is a degree, then an online degree is just as good as one where you have to sit in some boring classroom.

That sums it up for me. The price of education has gone up and the value has gone down; now it’s mainly a gravy train. It fits the formula of the baby boomers overtaking and transforming an institution (this time as parents) leaving somewhat of a mess its wake. Because of it, I’m dealing with a couple of my own teenagers who seem to have never, outside of this house, come across an argument for alternatives to four-year college, and I can also appreciate the cheekiness and forthright realism in offering degrees primarily in nursing, travel, and “beauty therapy.”

Franko @ 45: “… if the schedule plays out similarly this time, a huge war involving much of the world will begin about 2019-2021.”

We may have to move up that schedule, maybe by as much as 7 years. It gets back to Wretchard’s concept of the Design Margin, and what happens once it is all used up. Classic example is General Motors — one year they were the largest motor manufacturer in the world, next year bankrupt. Things can happen very quickly close to the end.

This ties back to the topic at hand. Everything the Leftists put their hand to, they end up destroying — be it the universities, K-12 education, the New York Times, New Orleans, the BBC, the Church of England, Mother Russia, North Korea. They just can’t help themselves, always using up the Design Margin instead of adding to it.

The state abhors competition, especially at the low end. The NYC subways have advertisements plastered by the City University featuring sad people describing how they were swindled by some private vocational school but are doing much better going to CUNY

Ah, yes, that new devil, the for-profit college.

Let me see: the “not-for-profit” universities pay fantabulous salaries to their presidents and administrators and deans, have hugely expensive sports programs where the coaches in the major sports get gargantuan renumeration; the tuitions at the “not-for-profit” universities often equal the median American annual income; the “not-for-profit’s” physical plant overhead is often as large as the GDP of Namibia, etc. None of this is true of the for-profits. One more example of upside-down progressive illogic.

I’ve long thought that Richard Fernandez is one of the greatest anatomists of the left writing today. If you agree with me lets encourage him to write a book on the same; it would practically self-assemble from many of his posts here over the years. It wouldn’t have to be scholarly work per se, but something in Richard’s free-wheeling style with the weight of his experience and hard thinking behind it; if you agree with me encourage our host to do so…cheers – DQ

My BS in engineering took more work than, say, a $33k/year (just tuition)education in gender and sexual studies (ie, womyn’s studies) masters of PhD from Rice, considered almost Ivy League quality. I bet a BS in Petroleum Engineering pays better than womyn’s studies…

Established in 1991, the undergraduate major comprises courses offered in the Schools of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Shepherd School of Music. Structured around two core courses – SWGS 101 “Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality” and SWGS 201 “Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies” – the program requirements include courses in feminist theory, critical race theory, and non-Western studies. Majors have the option of completing a year-long senior honors thesis. Majors and non-majors alike can participate in the Seminar and Practicum in Engaged Research.

HOUSTON – Police say an argument over karaoke music led to a deadly shooting early Monday morning.

Investigators say a man in his 20s was shot in the head inside Ostioneria Mazatlan #2 in the 6400 block of Hillcroft Street in southwest Houston.

A witness told FOX 26 News the victim had just finished singing karaoke when four men began arguing with him over his choice of music. Houston Police say the victim had just finished the song “Somos Mas Americanos” (We Are More American.)

At an adjacent table, a Hispanic man got up, pointed a pistol at the victim, and shot him in the head without warning.

“All of a sudden, four people show up and they didn’t like what the other guy singing, so they go and shoot him,” said Mario, an Ostioneria Mazatlan #2 employee. “I think it’s a, it’s a really, really terrible thing to happen.”

After recently visiting Britain I saw that people there are so far gone in democratic socialism that they have lost awareness of other modes of thought and other ways of structuring society. Alternatives to democratic socialism have gone down the memory hole.

There may be no way back for Britain. The country has a first world infrastructure that is starting to crumble and an ignorant often boorish population that behaves like a second world country. It echoes the time when Romans left their magnificent infrastructure around 400 AD to a bunch of ignorant Britons, Saxons, Picts and Franks. After the Roman Bridge across the Thames at Londinium fell into disrepair, the Saxons et al couldn’t fix it. Some time around 990 – 1016 a Saxon bridge was eventually built.

A modern day repeat of the decline of post Roman Britain is under way. Pity they never did get the hang of decent plumbing.

Of course, Apple and Google are sexy companies but to have this much market capital makes zero sense. Supposedly most of the movement in the DJIA has been due to one company, i.e. IBM. Normally market forces would not allow this sort of absurdity. However market forces have been sidelined by central bank intervention through the PPT. The markets are now poised to implode if a ***Single Company*** issues a bad quarterly report. It has been alleged that the European markets are in a similar situation if the Greek Thing falls apart which is supposed to happen in a few weeks.

I lost a job once long ago because the boss of my section of condiments packing machines wanted an all girl work force for his fiefdom.
Yup, any and all Males hired by the company for his department were found wanting for any reason or no reason and fired until Boss had his harem of female workers.
Real men just want to work with and be in charge of women for the obvious reasons or so he said.
I admit being boss over men and women may not be as stimulating as being the only man in charge of a room full of subservient women. In any case being a male at that company was just a short ride to being unemployed, if you were lucky it did not hamper your ability from getting another job, if not then you and your family were screwed.

The problem with intelligence is that one can facily figure things out, not realizing that there are other, better solutions or explanations. This leads to hubris – the smartest guy in the room syndrome.

“Becoming China’s B^tch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now” by Peter D. Kiernan, self-described as a “radical centrist,” identifies five factors that have sustained our national paralysis: [snip] the dangers of “the Media Talk Complex,” the influence of political lobbyists, the sway of biased think tanks, inter-religious friction, and the inability of the two party system to work properly.

Greedy B@stards by Dylan Ratigan, a migrant from CNBC to MSNBC, who describes the five “vampires” that are sucking the nation dry, including an educational system that values mediocrity above all else; a healthcare system that is among the priciest and least-effective infrastructures in the industrialized world; a political system in which lobbyists write legislation; a “master-slave” relationship with our Chinese bankers; and an addiction to foreign oil that has sapped our willingness to innovate.

Oxford and Cambridge are not what they used to be. They are state flagship institutions, and are said to be closer in essence to Berkeley or MIT than to the universities they once were. British aristocrats go to the University of St. Andrews.

One problem Ivy League institutions face is an avalanche of social climbers who apply not for a superior education but rather for the prestige and social connections that are supposed to come from association with such a place. Whenever Ivy League admissions officers tell young prospects that they can get just as good an education elsewhere – literally trying to push people away – the effect upon social climbers becomes even stronger. Gender Studies or Southern Studies may not make sense for someone planning to make a living, but they make perfect sense for young women looking for an MRS degree at a prestigious institution. Gender Studies basically functions as a feminist version of Home Economics, although Home Economics would probably be more useful.

When an institution becomes known more for its social prestige than for teaching actual knowledge, the net result is that it attracts social climbing airheads. Even so, a university that teaches absolutely nothing would still have value as a dating service. Indeed, serving as a dating service for rich and middle class youths appears to be the principal reason for the existence of many universities. The real scandal may not be whether anything of substance gets taught in academe, but rather that we would expect universities to teach skills and ideas when they actually serve as class segregation to limit students’ potential spouses to those that their parents would supposedly approve.

rl @ 69: The problem with intelligence is that one can facily figure things out, not realizing that there are other, better solutions or explanations. This leads to hubris – the smartest guy in the room syndrome.

I know just what you mean, and often find myself asking, “What kind of facile figured that was the answer?”

“… Watch certain TV shows, listen to certain radio programs, read certain newspapers, and you’re one of the truly bright and wonderful. Understanding is optional. This describes the readers of the NYT or Boston Globe and the almost all of the users of public broadcasting with perfection.

Crichton described this succinctly. Someone who reads the NYT science section once a week and presumes that they are an expert in science even though they majored in arts or social science and have never actually taken a real science or engineering course or have any job experience in those fields, or words to that effect.”

Then, 12 comments later, we see a dramatic demonstration that no mo uro’s central point is not limited to leftists when we read this boastful comment that would never, ever have been posted by anyone who actually had the slightest clue about the technology or specific situation in question:

After recently visiting Britain I saw that people there are so far gone in democratic socialism that they have lost awareness of other modes of thought and other ways of structuring society. Alternatives to democratic socialism have gone down the memory hole.

People have a way of getting seriously pissed when things gang aft aglee.

I give you, as one of many thousands of exhibits, John Cage’s “concerto” of four and a half minutes of NOTHING. Silence.

And the audience, in 1952 already!!! sat still for it.

Caligula electing his horse to the Senate — and they sat still for it. And he forced the aristocrats’ wives into a brothel in the imperial palace and invited all the lowest scum of Rome to come in and screw them: I guess we have that sort of thing to look forward to. We humans can go a LOT lower, folks.

Ugliness, vulgarity, perversion, willful ignorance, hatred of the Good: C. S. Lewis talked about it. Even that old sot Mencken wrote about the “libido for the ugly.”

Shakespeare wrote about rats “ravening down their proper bane.”

I just hate, hate, hate to see it happening to my dear country, once so healthy, optimistic, and good! God damn those who have brought this about.

Speaking of the communist mindset: Consumer Reports’ latest issue is taking it for granted that we’ll All be on government hellcare in 2014. Which they idiotically view as a Very Good Thing. They have the same cheerleader mentality about the hazardous-waste pigtail lightbulbs that cost the earth, are made by the Chinese Communists, give off Frankenstein lighting, and don’t work worth a damn.

Oh, but it’s all for Our Own Good, don’t you see. Just like the micro-drone surveillance aircraft (4 lbs) that El Hefe Major Bloomberg is eagerly seeking to spy on New Yorkers — even as he sides with the Leftoids who are protesting the police’s prudent surveillance of the ranting Muslim mosque-goers.

Dex@60: “I’ve long thought that Richard Fernandez is one of the greatest anatomists of the left writing today.”

Indeed. He’s the only ivy-league product I’ve ever found that was worth reading. One of my good friends from college went to Cornell, then on to Princeton and did some studying at Oxford. We put a perfectly good dirt farmer with a penchant for baseball jerseys and flannel shirts that was as intelligent as they come and with a with that would pierce body armor in one end…and when they shat him out he was a pipe-smoking, insincere snob with patches on the elbows of his corduroy jackets who I’m pretty sure wasn’t quite as intelligent as he was when he went in. It’s not so much that I dislike him now…we just find that we no longer have anything pertinent to say to each other on the rare occasions when we see each other.

I read yesterday that MIT’s first MITx online class will be 6.002 – Circuits and Electronics. Recalling my experience with this class 30 years ago made my head feel like Harry Potter’s when Voldemort was having a very bad day. I couldn’t decide if this decision was inspiration or insanity.

I initially thought insanity. Because of Institute rules, the Dept of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science couldn’t artificially limit enrollment. Their ingenious solution was to make students take the 2 hardest courses in each discipline first. As an aspiring computer scientist, 6.002 was the bane of my existence. Why would MIT use something like that its first offering? If you wanted to scare off would-be participants, you couldn’t have picked a better course.

And then I realized the inspiration of the choice…for the same reason the course was originally created. Unlike the Stanford AI course, there’s very little chance of overwhelming the staff on this one. As I thought more about it, I think that as a hiring manager I’d be more likely to hire anyone with a certification of completion of this one online course than someone with ANY degree from Bedfordshire. They obviously will have keen intellect, and prodigious work ethic and ability to learn. Perhaps these new ways to indicate suitability and accomplishment will be the pins that burst the Higher Ed bubble?

bev@76: “Piss Christ”, paid for by you and me, was IMO the biggest red flag for our society and country to date. I’m not a ranting Bible thumper, but I *am* a Christian. I was offended, sure, but that wasn’t the troubling thing. What bothered me most was that that was a crystal-clear sign that the traditions and mores that this country was founded on are being viciously torn town, and I don’t understand why. Those traditions and mores are what built the strongest, freest nation in the history of man…why are people constantly attacking them? They should be celebrating them.

Gay marriage is another example of this. I don’t hate or even dislike gays. I had a gay college roommate, and he gave me advice on how to dress or act to attract the ladies. It was fun, and he was a great guy. But until around the late 80s or early 90s, if asked what “marriage” was, they would answer something like “it’s the union of a man and a woman”. Now they’re changing the meaning. I HATE when the meaning of a word changes. Is it so hard to make up a new word for a new thing?

I guess I should have gone to an ivy-league school instead of a state college. I probably would understand more of the deeper secrets of life then.

Let’s not forget the Left’s ability to suck the joy out of just about everything. They are like some kind of modern industrial level pest. Never let a human mind be without one of their many incessant interminable distractions for a second. Like an automaton brat making ceaseless noise so the mind cannot meditate on anything. The proverbial Bongo Convention™. If they can distract us they can possess us as material things, or so they think.